The automation of vehicles is becoming increasingly prevalent for a number of reasons including greater efficiency and safety. There is thus a move to purpose-built vehicles that are optimised for autonomous or automated operation. One of the requirements for robust and safe automatic or fully autonomous operation is that the vehicle incorporate situational awareness capabilities and functionality.
This requires some means of detecting the boundaries of safe operation including potentially hazardous obstacles in the area in which the vehicle is operating. This is required so that the vehicle is not damaged, or causes damage to its surroundings, as it traverses the area or is controlled, whether autonomously or under remote control, to move to a location that could be dangerous or detrimental to operation of the vehicle or to its surroundings. However, it would be beneficial to maximise an operational envelope for the vehicle to give greater freedom to its autonomous capabilities.
While the use of cameras on vehicles provide some means of situational awareness of an operational zone about the vehicle, these cameras produce computationally complex output data. Such data require extensive bandwidth which adversely impacts communications between the vehicle and a remote location.